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 on the next hill and a garden of pettings and protections and tender scoldings, a hundred affectionate old-fashioned posies than can never, never blossom again, quite gone forever, Rhoda went all soft and said, wouldn't I see if some of them couldn't be transplanted into her garden. 'It won't be the same,' she said, 'nor nearly so nice, but it will be as nice as it knows how.' I told her it was lucky for me there was a her, because what would I have done if I'd had nobody but the Daggets and Sipes,—me with my one solitary relation who lives in Santa Fe and wears an ear-trumpet. She didn't tell me what I would have done, but she did tell me that while she probably wasn't at all in love with me in the way people are when they're 'in love,' she was certainly in love with me in some other sort of way and had been since the days when she used to's ay' me in her prayers along with John and Frances and her father, and it was absurd that people should give her all the money she wanted when she signed her name on a hunk of paper and only give me a tiny 'bit when I signed mine. 'As far as I'm concerned,' she said, 'you could have half all I've got tomorrow, and now that I'm twenty-one there's quite a lot. I don't see that it's any wronger to give somebody you like ten thousand a year than it is to give him a dozen handkerchiefs.'

"That little speech made me think; and it became clear to me that even the gift of a dozen handkerchiefs would have a demoralizing effect on you provided you